Algolia has a built-in cost management feature: set a budget, and you're notified if your projected invoice exceeds it. Find it under Billing > Cost Management in your dashboard.
For day-to-day monitoring rather than alerting, use API Monitoring > Usage, or pull the numbers programmatically with the Usage API, see How do I retrieve past search request and search operation data?
If your budget alert has triggered
A cost increase is almost always a rise in search requests or records. Common causes:
- A bug sending unnecessary requests - a runaway loop, or automatic page refreshes firing empty searches.
- Bot or scraper traffic hitting your search endpoint.
-
Unintended record growth - often from indexing with inconsistent
objectIDs, or from replicas.
Finding the source
Open Indices > Search API Logs in your dashboard. You can inspect individual search requests and their originating IP, which is usually enough to tell a bot from real traffic, look for one IP repeating the same query.
Then work through the diagnosis in Monitoring Search Operations.
Reducing what you're charged
-
Bot traffic - see How do I prevent or reduce bot traffic in Algolia Search?, which covers rate-limited API keys, infrastructure-level blocking, and
robots.txt. - Front-end request volume - see How do I reduce my cost while using InstantSearch?
- Understanding what you're billed for - see How Algolia counts search requests, operations, and records